The Hardest Part Is When You Know
by Anime Girl23
Summary: Integrating Snart back into the team came with an adjustment period, but he also came back with secrets he couldn't keep hidden as well as he did their last time around. The truth had to come out sometime and Leonard Snart could never do anything without it being dramatic. Mick/Len [Coldwave] Series: In The Time Of Our Lives [4/5]


**Series:** Part 4 of Time Of Our Lives

The Hardest Part Is When You Know  
One-shot

There was an adjustment period. They'd built themselves up from a clique-ridden team to one that worked, but it was one that didn't include Snart, and Snart was used to a team that included Rip and Kendra, not Nate and Amaya. He'd never been good with unfamiliar. People. Settings. Their travels had set him on edge from the get-go as his brain struggled to take in everything around him. Too much. Overloading.

He pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to ward off the oncoming headache, and waved Mick off when he drifted to his side. "I'm fine," he told him, hand flat in a careful _back off_ gesture. Well-meaning as he was, Mick had gotten overprotective since the time stream spat him out. He was fine. He could handle it. He just needed breathing room.

To his credit, Mick took the gesture for what it was and backed off, even if he did grumble as he did it. He didn't have to like it to respect Len's limits. They both knew he'd find his footing. It would just take time.

"Snart? You with us?" Sara questioned.

He forced himself to refocus on the readings Gideon laid out and nodded.

"So if you cross the streams with the guns-"

"Don't do it," Snart said, cutting Nate off.

" _Ever_ ," Mick finished and flashed Ray a look that made the man cringe.

"I said sorry about that, right?"

"You broke my gun," Snart said without humor.

"To save people," Ray tried, but Snart still clutched the handle in a protective grip. Somehow, he thought Snart cared more about his gun getting taken apart than he did about the people it saved. Anti-hero at his best, Ray thought with a nervous chuckle.

"You blew yourself up to save the world, Snart," Mick reminded him. "I don't think you get to talk."

"I didn't do it to save the world," he said, sounding more like Mick with the growl than he sounded like himself. Well, Ray figured, couples did start to take on each other's characteristics eventually.

Mick raised an eyebrow—and looked entirely too much like Snart when he did it—but they all understood what Snart wasn't saying. He hadn't done it to save the world. He'd done it to save Mick.

"Your gun's not balanced," Snart added with a mutter. "Flames are shooting off to the left."

"Barely," Mick scoffed, but he'd fix it later. He always did. "Is your gun even hitting absolute zero anymore?"

Snart powered it up. "Want to find out?"

"He's…dramatic," Nate commented, leaning in towards Sara as they watched Snart taunt a Civil War slave owner. "Is he telling the truth?"

"That his mom was a black Jew?" Mick checked as he came up on Nate's other side. "Oh, yeah. He used to drive the Arian Nation insane whenever he was at Iron Heights."

Sara stared between Mick and the show Snart was putting on across the way. The slave owners were getting progressively redder. "Why do I have a feeling he just made it worse?"

"Because he probably just told them he's gay." He waved a hand. "Not like they had a term for pansexual in 1862." She didn't think they called them gay back then either, but judging by the pointed look Snart had just given a slave owner's crotch—insincere as anything, because they all knew he had better taste—she was pretty sure he'd gotten his point across.

"He's going to get shot."

"He lifted their ammo before he even went out there," Mick reassured her and lifted a pocket watch from the depths of his jacket. "Grabbed a few extras too."

Nate's brows furrowed. "Why?"

"He's a diagnosed klepto," Mick reminded him. "He gets twitchy in new places."

"All we do is travel," Sara sighed. "Is he filing his nails right now?"

"You're lucky he's not wearing the kilt."

"I'm kind of sad he's not."

The dinnertime stories continued, drifting more towards random ramblings than the old habit of talking about the people left behind. Laughter and jokes and coming together. Snart watched them with a critical eye and never participated. He stayed because of the hand Mick kept on his knee, but without it, he would have left the second he was done eating.

"I don't do story time," he drawled one night when Amaya asked him about his sister.

"When you're ready," Nate said with the same smile he gave Mick when the talks started. Earnest. Welcoming. Mick didn't tell him to get his hopes up.

"Worry less about my story and ask the professor if he remembered to call his wife."

"Excuse me?" Stein sputtered.

"Time's still moving in 2017," he told him, tone mocking. "Is your anniversary that hard to remember?"

Stein frowned, ready to argue, before his eyes went wide.

"Tick tock, Professor."

"Gray, you didn't," Jax groaned as Stein darted out of his chair. " _Again_?!"

"Is that another Oculus thing?" Ray asked, cautious. They didn't talk about it much, the after effects that had seemed to cling to Snart after he recovered. He could sense aberrations now, feel the pull of them deep in his gut. Being around Lily still made him queasy and even though she knew what she was, they never had the heart to tell her why Len left the ship every time she visited.

Mick snorted. "It's a Snart thing," he told him before Len could start pulling the kid's leg. "He's practically got a calendar in his head."

"His wife also called earlier." Len lifted a phone out of his pocket and slid it across the table to Jax. "He really shouldn't lose his phone."

"Says the guy that _stole it_ ," Jax retorted, but he met Snart's grin with one of his own.

He was bent over his cold gun when Amaya walked in, eyes blank until he seemed to shake himself out of it. She frowned, concerned, as she watched him rub his hand over his face.

"Leonard?" she called carefully. "Are you okay?"

He still startled at her voice. "Fine."

She approached him slowly, the same way she would a spooked animal. They weren't friends, stuck somewhere closer to reluctant teammates than anything. He'd warmed up to her marginally faster than he had Nate, but she had a feeling that was simply due to the friendship she'd already forged with Mick. He didn't seem like someone that trusted easily. "You're not an easy person to startle."

He shot her a dark look rather than argue with her, something she was sure usually worked to scare off other people, but not with her. For all the bad he'd done in his past, she couldn't be scared of the man that complained when Mick forced vegetables on him.

"Sara was looking for you," she passed on. "She needs your help with a security system."

"We're robbing banks now?" he asked as his eyebrow quirked up, interested.

"Not quite. An agricultural firm got their hands on an original strain of the Black Death. They're looking at it as," her nose screwed up, disgusted, "population control."

"We steal it back."

"And destroy it."

"Tell Mick he'll get to start a bonfire," he said with a nod and flashed her a ghost of a grin. It almost felt like an olive branch.

She took it and gave him a gentle smile in return. "Already done."

"I say we finally take that break," Jax announced when he dropped into a chair, exhausted and rubbing at a sore shoulder. "We've been busting our asses. I think Mick had the right idea about Aruba."

"With our luck, it'll be crawling with aberrations," Nate reminded him tiredly.

"Snart hasn't sensed anything."

"Yet," Sara added, "but he's not an aberration detector. He's missed some before."

Jax shrugged and reached over to nudge Stein. "Come on, Gray. Even you have to admit we need a break."

"It might be wise."

"See? We should-"

Ray came crashing into the room, panting as he burst out, "There's something wrong with Snart. The cargo bay-"

"Find Mick," Sara told him before she went running, the others at her heels.

He was doubled over when they reached him, body curled in on itself and blood leaking from his knuckles. She knelt next to him, hands hovering, but reluctant to touch. Conscious, she told herself as she knelt next to him. Breathing. He was fine. He was fine. Ray just exaggerated.

"Snart, what's going on?"

He didn't reply, didn't even give any indication that he'd heard her at all. That he'd registered her. She frowned, concern growing and heightening when she finally noticed the bloody lines on the wall next to them. She couldn't find a pattern in it, but the medium was enough to set her on edge.

"Snart?"

"Is he okay?" Jax asked when no response came.

"I don't know."

"Should we get him to med bay?" Nate asked as he stepped closer. "Maybe it's an Oculus thing."

They heard the pounding of Mick's boots before they saw him rounding the corner with Amaya and Ray at his side. Wide eyes took in the room, from the bloody knuckles to the wall to the glazed look in his husband's eyes. He sighed. "Damn it, Len." He shook his head and stepped forward, shooing Sara back. "I got it."

"You don't look worried," Ray said, confused, and looked at Sara. "Why doesn't he look worried?"

"That's what I want to know," she replied, but Mick seemed to be ignoring them as he knelt next to Snart.

"Hey," he murmured, "I'm gonna grab your wrist, okay?" He waited a second before he did it, fingers curling around Snart's the one that didn't still have the brace and stroking the pulse point with his thumb. "You wanna come back, Lenny?"

No words, but Snart tipped forward until his forehead touched Mick's knee. The most jarring thing might have been that his eyes stayed open, glazed and staring at nothing. He didn't even blink.

Mick sighed. "Okay. We can do it the long way," he said gently. He shifted so he could sit against the wall and pulled Snart against him, fingers running up and down his partner's spine. "You couldn't have picked a more comfortable place to do this?"

"You're acting like this is normal," Jax said, bewildered, as he watched them with wide eyes.

"It happens." Mick shrugged.

"He's having a breakdown," Sara told him carefully. They should have been more careful, she told herself. Snart had spent a year getting tossed around the time stream and trying to piece himself back together. They should have considered some kind of mental instability after.

"Trust me," Mick replied, "this isn't a breakdown. He just checked out."

"Mr. Rory," Stein started, "if he's not mentally stable-"

"He's _fine_ ," Mick stressed. "His brain overloads sometimes. It's just the LLI."

"What is that?" Amaya asked, sounding self-conscious. Mick had been teaching her about mental illness since he'd corrected her about her animal comments, but LLI wasn't something she'd heard mentioned before.

"Low Latent Inhibition," Mick clarified, but his eyes stayed on Len. "His brain processes everything, breaks it all down." He snorted softly. "You should see him try and work on the cold gun when he's stressed." It had freaked the Rogues out the first time they saw him do it, too. "Sometimes, he's just gotta shut down."

"Mick-"

"I've known him for thirty years, Haircut. Trust me," he said. "It happened a few times back in Boston, too." His hand stopped its course across Snart's spine and settled in a firm hold at the back of his neck, kneading at the muscles. "If you can't talk him out of it, get me, and don't touch him. He lets me and Lisa, but he's not good with touch on a normal day."

"You're not trying to talk him out of it," Jax pointed out.

Mick shrugged the shoulder Snart wasn't leaning on. "Can't always."

"You should have told us," Sara said, but the scolding tone she tried for fell flat, drowned out by the worry gnawing at her stomach.

"It's his business."

"That you just told us." Though, she doubted he'd told them everything.

"Because you're looking at him like you want to stick him in a padded room." Mick sighed and shook his head. "You want details on this shit, ask Gideon. He's _fine_."

He glared at them until they left, like a wolf protecting its pack.

They researched, listening as Gideon explained the aspects of LLI and of someone with Snart's IQ having it. Coping mechanisms. The hardships. Stein took notes, nodding along as if he was fascinated by a condition that usually got misdiagnosed as ADHD or some form of autism. Jax kept wringing his hands. Nate and Ray tossed theories back and forth like volleyballs. Sara glanced past the doorway of the bridge, worried.

"He's okay, though?" she checked, knots in her stomach like she needed the reassurance.

"Quite," Gideon replied.

Still, it was hours before any of them saw Mick and Snart emerge from the cargo bay. They spent the time in between surrounded by information and finally researching things they should have researched long ago. Kleptomania. Pyromania. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Sara picked at her nails as she read over PTSD information that hit closer to home than she wanted to admit. She wasn't surprised.

Amaya was whispering quietly with Jax about pyromania when their missing teammates joined them. Snart moved a little sluggishly, fingers rubbing at his temple, but he didn't seem to argue with the way Mick hovered.

"Did we miss mid-terms?" Snart asked, looking around at the mess of printouts, but there was an edge to his voice. Sara thought it might have been embarrassment.

"No, but I think we read enough to at least get us an Associate's Degree in psychology," Nate replied with an easy grin.

"My brain hurts," Jax sighed and shoved away a pile of papers. "I say we land in Chicago and get some deep dish pizza."

"Can we stop by Hong Kong after?" Ray asked hopefully. "I want noodles."

"Does no one appreciate fresh pasta?" Stein sighed, put out.

"We could split the difference and get burgers?" Nate suggested.

"How is that splitting the difference?" Amaya asked with a laugh.

"I just really want a burger."

Sara shook her head and reached over to start gathering the papers. "Pick one place. We're not hopping across the world for dinner."

Mick watched them, bewildered, and looked over at Snart. "Business as usual?"

Len shrugged a shoulder, surprised and relieved that they weren't burying him with questions and accusations about lying. His brain still felt out of sorts, pulling itself out of the fog his shutdown had brought. "Looks like," he murmured to Mick before he stepped around a few pages with _pyromania_ written in bold letters. "Bacon burgers," he told the others and cast his vote.

Nate gave a triumphant cheer.

Mick tossed his head back and laughed. "You're a _horrible_ Jew."

The End


End file.
